Oliver Letwin caught dumping government documents in park

[oldironside]

"Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin has been dumping government documents in park waste paper bins, it was reported today.

The Daily Mirror reported that Mr Letwin had been seen disposing of papers at a park close to Downing Street on five separate occasions.

The newspaper said the MP discarded more than 100 papers, including correspondence on terrorism and national security as well as constituents' private details.

One document was said to describe how intelligence chiefs "failed to get the truth" on Britain's involvement in controversial terrorist interrogations.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/oliver-letwin-caught-dumping-government-documents-in-park-2370507.html

Certainly the strangest and most surprising thing an MP has ever done in a public park.

[T_i_B]

1. Oh dear Oh dear Oh dear.

"Oliver Letwin does some of his parliamentary and constituency correspondence in the park before going to work and sometimes disposes of copies of letters there They are not documents of a sensitive nature," the spokesman said.

Silly question, but what on earth is wrong with doing such work in something called an office?

And hasn't Oliver Letwin ever heard of a wonderful little invention called the paper shredder?

You'd hope the security cheifs will have been tearing Oliver Letwin a new arsehole over this.

[Jeneral2885]

2. when you get chosen as a minister

there's no training for you to know how to dispose of your documents.

[oldironside]

3. And it seems that you have to...

... leave your common sense at the door.

I don't think any private citizen would throw letters with personal information on them into a public rubbish bin without either shredding or burning them first. Letwin is either totally out of touch or a village somewhere in the south east is missing its idiot.

[ikri]

4. Indeed

The only difference that I can see between a civil servant leaving a USB stick or briefcase full of government documents on a train and what Letwin has done is that Letwin did this deliberately.

If this wasn't a Tory minister (and if Liam Fox hadn't just resigned to distract from this story) then I feel the media would have been all over this and the Tories themselves would have probably been asking questions in Parliament about this.

[non sociopath skin]

5. Which, to be fair, IS quite a big difference ..

Some wag on the Guardian message board suggested that Fox had written his resignation letter last week and given it to Letwin to deliver ....

:rofl:

The Skin

[oldironside]

6. Can't be true.

It wasn't a Mirror exclusive.

[LeftishBrit]

8. No...

but these days, even Joe and Jane Public with no training would generally have the sense not to toss their bank statements, for example, into a park bin.

[LeftishBrit]

7. It is amazing

how modern politicians tend to combine the surveillance state, and a security obession, with utter carelessness about any data that they themselves have responsibility for.

This is a bipartisan issue (remember those discs left on the train?) but I must say this involves quite a degree of *personal* stupidity by the Minister. But then it's Letwin, so not surprising.

[fedsron2us]

9. Any Civil Servant guilty of such benaviour would be sacked

All government documents are 'Classified' in the sense that they have security markings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_Kingdom

The fact that the information may not have been Secret is hardly an excuse.

The ISC letters must surely have carried such security markings.

As any humble government clerk would be able to tell you pleading ignorance or lack of training is no defence when losing government information. They would still fire you. Indeed the same applies to contractors working for the government. I know of one incident where staff employed in a computer centre were sacked because they allowed government letters to be sent out from a defective automatic mailing process where a tiny portion of the correspondence was visible in the address window of the envelope. No mercy was shown.

As for the constuents letters Letwins cavalier treatment of their supposedly private correspondence says it all really.

It just shows contempt for the people he was elected to serve.